Advertising For All; Or For Nobody At All; Reclaim Public Opinion

In June 2008 Freee art collective sited a billboard image titled Protest Drives History in the ICA Bar as part of their involvement in Nought to Sixty. As a continuation of this project, and the use of the social space of the bar, Freee have produced a new billboard poster that calls for advertising to be employed by everyone in order to affect and change public opinion. Freee believe that the radical response to advertising is not to obliterate it or to reform it but to hand it over to dissenters and agents of counter-hegemony. In the new work, Advertising For All; Or For Nobody At All; Reclaim Public Opinion, the three artists pose with coloured paper shopping bags on their heads. This image is not a celebration of advertising execs and their slick marketing, Freee are not celebrities: they are present in the work as a strategy to embody and stand up for what they believe in. And like all whistle blowers it is Freee that face reprisal.

In conjunction with the launch of the new billboard image, Freee will also be performing (through a spoken-word choir of invited guests) a reading of their new manifesto The Freee Manifesto For Guerrilla Advertising (After The Revolution) at 6pm on Wednesday 11 February in the ICA Bar. Members of the public are invited to come along and read the bits from the manifesto they agree with. For a free copy of the manifesto please email info@freee.org.uk. The manifestos will also be available in the ICA bookshop after the event.